50 Cent Embraces The LGBT Community

As hip-hop has long struggled to sustain a relationship with the LGBT community, 50 Cent now takes yet another step towards closing the gap. Explaining that contrary to popular belief, he has never had a problem with homophobia, the rapper adds that he even experienced the LGBT culture at an early age as his mother was a bisexual.

“I don’t have homophobia. I never did,” said 50 Cent in an interview with The Wrap. “When you actually make music that mirrors the environment, you use the terminology. You use the language. Like if you were making a painting, and you were painting the American flag, if I told you to do that, and not use red, not use the harsh terms or the tougher messages, you would never successfully paint the flag.”

Continuing, “I would use the terminology that would be going around. My grandfather may say terms…people may actually say terms based on their experiences that were happening at that point. … You’ve got people that would call some people a redneck, or some people n*gger. It’s the term of that time or that period. They’re not necessarily racist, but they’ve heard those terms used around them, and they use them.”

Maintaining that although he’s spat some questionable lines regarding the topic throughout his career, he assures that he’s got to have love for the bunch because his mother also held romances with women. In The Game’s “Hate It Or Love It,” on which 50 features he also raps, “Coming up I was confused, my mother kissing a girl.”

“My mom — that’s all I know of my mom,” he said of the topic. “When I tell you she’s the most important thing that I’ve had in my life, because I don’t know my father at all, she’s all I have it makes it clear that I don’t actually have those issues.”

Ending that he’s optimistic about the conjoined future of rap and the LGBT community stating, “When new artists or new approaches come to the culture, it grows.”

50 Cent will soon appear on the new Sundance Channel series, Dream School. The rapper will mentor a transgender boy, Alan, who is struggling with the pressures of his adolescent peers. “I want to graduate and get away from the people at my school,” Alan says on the show, which premieres next week. “I got bullied. I went to the hospital. My mom just didn’t even visit me. I wish I was the person my parents wanted me to be. I wish I was born the person I am now because… I was born a girl.”